Hi all!

Thank you for helping me out to make our live stream for ESL EXPerience LAN (League of Legends) event even better!

I’ll describe every part of our live stream set-up, from big things to details as I want to share my experience with people, and maybe help someone for future live streaming, and ofcourse learn something new (as always) from professionals here 😉

First of all you can watch the full live stream of last day (14h) here: http://www.twitch.tv/eslhr/c/2594738

As this was live stream for LAN event I needed “professional” (more consumer) equipment for every part of my idea for the live stream.

So let’s start 😉

My PC for livestreaming:

• i5 3570k @4.2gHZ

• 8GB DDR3

• MSI Lightning HD 6970

• SSD 64GB 😛

• 6TB of HDD

• BlackMagic Intensity Pro

• Blackmagic Decklink SDI

PC SET-UP FOR COMMENTATORS

1. 2 notebooks with native 1920×1080 resolution, so that commentators can watch to notebook’s LCD, so that we don’t need another LCD in full HD resolution 1. 1st commentator’s notebook (Toshiba Qosmio, gaming notebook) hooked up to streaming PC with HDMI to BlackMagic Intensity Pro in full HD resolution and mirrored

   2. 2nd commentator's notebook (**Toshiba Qosmio, gaming** notebook) sadly hooked up to 2 older projectors via VGA switch in 1280x1024 (I think) resolution so audience can watch League of Legends in real time.
   

CAMERA SET-UP

And as room where the event was is 14×14 meters halved in middle, audience in front and gamers in the back of the room I needed at least two cameras.

1. How to hook up cameras to PC when you have one BlackMagic Intensity Pro available? 😀

Happily we got sponsored by Visual Impact which gave us ATEM Television Studio and BlackMagic Decklink SDI card.

1. Sony Full HD Pro camera (I don’t know the model) hooked up to the ATEM with HDMI (input 1)

   1. One of the biggest problems was that I couldn’t record and stream from this camera in the same time just because it would show the STUPID MEMORY ICON in the preview and you can’t turn it off (even when display information is turned off), so I needed to disconnect it’s SD card, without possibility to record to it… :S But Canon saved us! 😀

2. Canon XF 105 (many thanks to Canon Croatia for borrowing it to us!) hooked up with BNC (HD-SDI) cable to ATEM (input 3).

   1. Yes, Canon saved us! We were able to record and stream with this camera in the same time because when you record to the card it doesn’t shows any ICON (if display is turned off) on the display or output! 32GB of CF did the job 🙂

ATEM Television Studio

Not sure how many of you actually know how ATEM Television Studio from BlackMagic works but I’ll describe how we used it.

And I’ll point some flaws with it, and good things too 🙂

1. As we only had ATEM Television Studio to hook up 2 cameras to one PC (one capture card) we needed to arrange how to get ATEM working. We hooked up ATEM to PC to Decklink SDI card as 2nd BM card.

   1. ATEM works as a **switch for video sources**, and you can only control it through ethernet access. It's USB connector is only used for setting IP address (for ethernet access) and for updating ATEM to new firmware.
   2. When I was testing ATEM in my house I hooked it up to my normal router with I actually connect to Internet. The problem was that after some time of usage ethernet on ATEM would stop working, and even if you  turn it off manually by disconnecting the plug sometime ethernet won't work.
   3. This was a bad thing when you need to have a live stream of event in few days and actually doesn't know the reason. By reading forums I found that this ATEM has a bug, some problem with oscillator... BUT!
   4. On the same day of event, first day, ATEM was hooked up to my laptop, because you can't install ATEM switcher to the same PC on which is installed BM Intensity Pro or any other card! I hooked up ATEM through router to my laptop, and first day it worked OK, but 2nd day ethernet port would just stop working.
   

   5. First we tought that ATEM might get hot (I put an USB cooler to ATEM). 6. But then we tried with crossover cable directly plugging to laptop and setting manually an IP address, and that worked OK! 7. But still not sure why that actually happened!

SWITCHING CAMERAS WITH ATEM

As I was simultaneously working on another PC with vMix so I can actually stream to twitch, set-up all scene and overlay I needed an ability to switch cameras because ATEM can only show one camera at once!

1. Laptop with running ATEM Switcher next to me, setup to switch from camera 1 (input 1) to camera 2 (input 3) with ENTER key so that I don’t need to look in laptop when switching cameras!

2. As I described before when we got to the problem that we can’t switch camera we got only one default first input working, which is OK as it is camera 1. But to get that working with crossover cable we needed to manually turn off the ATEM which would cause the black screen on live stream

3. But as I had an 3rd camera, which was actually USB HD WebCam I put as full screen when we were setting ATEM up 😀 lol

After all ATEM Television Studio did it’s job pretty well, and after some research I found Skaarhoj guy that made some nice equipment for it. http://skaarhoj.com/products/overview/

AUDIO FROM MICROPHONES

Hopefully we had a cheap Behringer USB audio mixer which we connected to my streaming PC and to the speakers for audience.

The set-up for commentators was 2 Rhode wireless headset microphones connected to audio mixer.

Tho sometime we heard a audio interference from mics… Might be a wireless interference… Not sure.

All microphones from cameras were turned OFF!

SOFTWARE USED FOR LIVE STREAMING/ENCODING

• vMix

• Open Broadcaster

• Flash Media Live Encoder

vMix

After trying sofware for live streaming like Wirecast, XSplit and such someone suggested me to try vMix (thank you Redditors!!!) and found that it’s a great pretty powerful software!

So this is my setup for vMix

1. 1920×1080 input from BlackMagic Intensity Pro for capturing League of Legends game

2. 1920×1080 input from BlackMagic Decklink SDI for capturing ATEM/cameras

3. All overlays for League of Legends game, like sponsors, teams and such

4. Music for viewers on livestream

5. Audio from USB Behringer XENYX 6 channel audio mixer.

6. Logitech USB WebCam as second camera to fill the “hole” in overlay when streaming LoL

Output from vMix ON!

And this is why, as our input to vMix was fully in 1920×1080 and it’s output too we needed to stream in 720p and 480p. But sadly we didn’t had a Twitch channel with partnership to stream in multiple resolutions simultaneously, so we needed two channels separated. 😀

Software set-up for ENCODING and LIVE STREAMING to Twitch

• Open Broadcaster – input from vMix in 1920×1080, downscalling it to 1280×720 (720p) and streaming to twitch.tv/eslhr

• Adobe Flash Media Live Encoder – input from vMix in 1920×1080 downscalling it to 480p and streaming to twitch.tv/eslhr_low

Sadly at that moment I didn’t know** how to run multiple instances of OBS**, but yesterday I found out that you can actually write in the command line of the .exe this: -multi ,and then you can start as many OBS’s you want and stream at any channels you want!

I’ve described it here: https://obsproject.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=85&p=32798#p32798

**As I wanted to stream and record in the same time I wasn’t available to do that because FMLE took the whole processing power of my PC for just encoding 480p 😛 **

But when I found out that I can run multiple instances of OBS this kinda solved the issue, as OBS doesn’t take that much processing power when live streaming/encoding!

For any questions feel free to ask, and sorry for my bad English 😀

If I think of something I might missed here, I’ll add it.

🙂